Fighting spreads to more towns as Falluja operation continues

US troops called in air strikes on the Iraqi city of Baquba yesterday as they fought gun battles in the street with crowds of insurgents.

Fallout from the week-long assault on the city of Falluja spread in several towns across the country.

As well as the fighting in Baquba, a mixed Sunni and Shia town north of Baghdad, there were clashes in Baghdad, Ramadi, Buhriz, Mosul and Suwayra.

In a blow against the insurgency, the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said members of a militant group known as Jaish Muhammad (the Army of Muhammad), including its leader, had been arrested during the assault on Falluja.

The group is one of around a dozen insurgent organisations responsible for kidnappings and attacks on the US military and Iraqi security forces.

Fighting in Baquba began early yesterday when fighters armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked soldiers from the US 1st Infantry Division near a police station.

The soldiers then came under fire from a nearby mosque. Iraqi forces stormed the mosque and found rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and other weapons.

US troops then called in air strikes and two 500lb bombs were dropped on "anti-Iraqi forces' positions", the military said.

Officials at the main police station in Baquba said 26 insurgents and five Iraqi police had been killed in the fighting.

One Iraqi policeman and seven civilians died, a hospital official said. Four American soldiers were injured.

In Buhriz at the same time, an attack on a police station killed the town's police chief.

In Falluja, US troops continued to fight insurgents in the south of the city. There were heavy bombing raids and artillery fire, with aircraft making up to 30 bombing runs.

Colonel Michael Regner, operations officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Falluja, said at least 1,052 insurgents had been taken prisoner during the assault, and more than 1,000 killed. No more than about two dozen were from outside Iraq, he said.

The military previously estimated about 500 insurgents had been taken prisoner.

Col Regner added that 38 US troops had been killed and 320 wounded in the operation.

"Falluja is no more a safe haven for the terrorists and killers. This thing is over," the interior minister, Falah Hassan al-Naqib, said in Baghdad.

Col Regner said some insurgents may have sought refuge in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, where there was heavy fighting yesterday, and two car bombs detonated near a US convoy.

Further north, in Mosul, which has seen serious violence in the past week, five American soldiers were injured when a suicide bomber detonated his car near a US military convoy.

"I expect the next few days will bring some hard fighting," the US commander in the city, Brigadier General Carter Ham, said.

In Suwayra, south of Baghdad, two policemen and five National Guardsmen were killed.

In an audiotape on an Islamist website, Jordanian terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said the Americans were avoiding attacks against some rebel strongholds while fighting in Falluja.

"The enemy is now avoiding fighting you for fear of dispersion and attrition," the speaker said. "It has massed its capabilities ... to finish off Islam in Falluja. If it finishes Falluja, it will move in your direction. Beware and deny it the chance to carry out this plan."

He said that the Americans were overextended and "cannot expand" their operations. "Shower them with rockets and mortars and cut all the supply routes," he said.

· The Hungarian parliament yesterday rejected a government proposal to extend the stay of 300 non-combat troops in Iraq by three months until March 31 next year.